The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  The queen’s opposition to the Spanish match had become a major obstacle to it proceeding, and contributed to the complex treaty negotiations going adrift. However, in December 1618, as her illness had become dangerous, Anne had switched her position again, suddenly becoming ‘very anxious’ for Charles to marry the infanta, wanting in her final days to do her ‘utmost to that end’. ‘She hates a French marriage,’ the Venetian ambassador reported, ‘and opposes it openly.’

  Whatever prompted the second change of mind is as unclear as the first, but it was in the painful, final days of his mother’s life that Charles was among the first to become aware of it.

  On 1 March 1619, by now attended only by her faithful Danish maid Anna Roos, the forty-four-year-old queen’s condition worsened dramatically and she lost her sight. Roos rushed to tell Charles that she was about to succumb, and the two of them were at her bedside when she died in the early hours of the following day.

  Soon after it was discovered her jewels, the subject of the controversy over her will, had been stolen by Hugon. Some trunks that he had sent to France were subsequently tracked down, and found to contain not only the loot, but Catholic paraphernalia, revealing the extent of Anne’s commitment to the old religion.

  The queen was buried in May, James upstaging the funeral by suffering a dramatic deterioration in his own health, complaining of ‘pain in his joints’, probably gout, and ‘nephritis’. Other complications soon began to develop, including ‘fainting, sighing, dread, incredible sadness, intermittent pulse’.

  Convinced that he too was about to follow his wife into the grave, he summoned Charles, George and leading members of his Privy Council to hear his deathbed speech, which the obsequious Bishop of Lincoln, John Williams, found of such profound importance he wrote that it deserved to be ‘written in letters of gold’. James charged his lords and bishops with ‘the care of religion and justice’, and to look after ‘that disciple of his whom he so loved in particular’, George. And he ended ‘with that heavenly advice, to his son, concerning that great act of his future marriage’. Charles should make his own choice of bride, he gasped, reaching for a final few breaths, but urged him to pursue the Spanish match.

  These theatrics coincided with a period of fast-moving and dramatic international events. Barely a week after Anne’s death, news arrived that the Archduke of Austria, Ferdinand II, had become Holy Roman Emperor.

  The Holy Roman Empire, famous for not being either of its adjectives, nor hardly its noun, was made up of a collection of states and kingdoms spanning central Europe, roughly covering the territory of modern Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic, as well as parts of northern Italy, Poland and Slovenia. Though it was separate from the kingdom of Spain, the emperor and the Spanish king were both Catholic and members of the same Habsburg family, their confession and kinship ensuring that the two powers usually worked in unison.

  The predecessors of the new emperor had tolerated a mixture of religious views among the dukes and princes of the empire’s dominions, but Ferdinand, a devout Catholic, wanted to establish religious uniformity across his domains. This policy was tested almost as soon as he took the imperial throne, when the Kingdom of Bohemia rose in a state of rebellion against Ferdinand’s rule. A group of protestors broke into the royal palace at Prague and threw two imperial representatives out of a high window, re-enacting a revolt that had taken place in the early fifteenth century, the so-called ‘Defenestration of Prague’. The rebels then offered the Bohemian crown to Frederick, ruler of the Palatinate and husband of Elizabeth, the daughter of King James and Queen Anne. This was, if anything, an even more provocative act, as Frederick was, after his British father-in-law, the most powerful Protestant prince in Europe.

  Going against James’s advice, Frederick accepted the Bohemian throne, and on 4 November 1619 received the crown of St Wenceslas at St Vitus Cathedral, a heavily pregnant Elizabeth at his side.

  By this stage, James had recovered from his illness to find his entire foreign policy thrown into turmoil by these events. His son-in-law’s precipitate behaviour had upset ‘all Christendom by the ears’, unleashing convulsive forces that threatened to push the entire Continent into religious and dynastic war. Thanks to the family connections, Frederick had managed to draw Britain into the fray, putting James, who styled himself Rex Pacificus, the king of peace, into an extremely awkward position.

  At the beginning of the year, James had made George ‘Lord Admiral of the Fleet’, succeeding the eighty-year-old Charles Howard, the heroic leader of the fleet that had defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588. George had revelled in his new role, attending formal events dressed in a suit of armour engraved with crossed anchors. But, to James’s alarm, the favourite had also begun to adopt an appropriately warlike stance towards the developments on the Continent, arguing in the Privy Council that the king should give his son-in-law and his allies full military backing. He had won the support of several of his fellow councillors, including William Herbert, the powerful Earl of Pembroke, who seemed convinced that for ‘the cause of religion, his son’s preservation, and his own honour’, the king should surely ‘perform whatsoever belongs to the Defender of the Faith, a kind father-in-law, and one careful of that honour which I must confess by a kind of misfortune hath long lain in suspense’.

  Even the usually shy and cautious Charles, who was now ‘very friendly’ with George, had joined in with the military tattoo, impressed that Frederick had shown himself to be ‘of so ripe a judgement and of so forward an inclination to the good of Christendom’. It demonstrated the kind of princely daring and political idealism that had characterized his late brother Henry. ‘I will be glad to not only assist him with my countenance,’ Charles announced, ‘but also with my person, if the King my father will give me leave.’ But James would not give him leave. In fact, he would not allow anything to be done to support his impulsive son-in-law.

  The result was political gridlock and incoherence. The French ambassador wondered if James had become deranged: ‘It seems to me that the intelligence of this King has diminished. His timidity increases day by day as old age carries him into apprehension and vices diminish his intelligence.’ The king told a foreign envoy about a letter he had received from his five-year-old grandson Frederick Henry, pleading for him to come to the aid of his exiled father and mother. He admitted that the child’s entreaties had put him in a ‘great strait’, and lamented that he was being drawn ‘to one side by his children and grand-children, his own flesh and blood, and to the other side by the truth and by his friendship’ towards the Holy Roman Emperor.

  James’s only consolation was news that his old friend, Diego Gondomar, was on his way back to London. Philip III of Spain had decided to dispatch his emissary soon after Frederick’s coronation in Prague. Gondomar had been reluctant to leave, claiming that he had not yet recovered from an illness that had forced his departure from London two years before. ‘The matter of England requires someone who is healthy and robust,’ he told his masters. He was also, despite appearances during his previous embassy, ambivalent about the idea of continuing peace with Britain, concerned it was allowing the country to build up commercial wealth and naval power at Spain’s expense.

  His objections were ignored, and in January 1620, Gondomar set off. He arrived in London in early March, and headed straight for Theobalds, where the king was staying. He was greeted by George and other courtiers and shown into an upstairs meeting room. As they were waiting for the king, the floor gave way, plunging several dignitaries, including the Earl of Arundel, into the room beneath. Gondomar was saved by standing in a doorway, and quipped in a letter home that ‘the puritans have tried and are trying to have me killed’.

  Despite the inauspicious reception, the reunion of the Two Diegos was warm, James gently chiding him for his absence by proclaiming that the man before him looked just like an old friend of his, the Conde de Gondomar!

  Their private talks began with James trying to explain,
in overwrought and self-pitying tones, his predicament. ‘I hear,’ he said, ‘from Buckingham, that when you shook his hand you squeezed his sore finger hard enough to hurt him.’ The ambassador, he warned, must not squeeze so hard, as James, too, was tender. He had suffered terribly from the imbroglio in Bohemia, fearing that it had destroyed all their hard work to bring Britain and Spain closer together. ‘I give you my word,’ he said, taking Gondomar’s hand, ‘as a king, as a gentleman, as a Christian, and as an honest man, that I have no wish to marry my son to anyone except your master’s daughter,’ adding for good measure ‘that I desire no alliance but that of Spain’. Having said his piece, he took off his hat, as if exhausted by the effort, and wiped his sweating forehead with a handkerchief.

  Others did not find the ambassador’s reappearance so welcome. During his first night in London, the battle drums were being beaten up and down the streets to summon a volunteer force to be sent to Bohemia to help Frederick and Elizabeth, and the following morning Gondomar found a placard nailed to the door of his lodgings inviting men to enlist to fight Spanish tyranny. The Venetian ambassador noted that ‘the Protestants and the generality’ viewed Gondomar ‘with jaundiced eyes’. ‘One already hears bitter speeches and very improper remarks, vigorously expressed, about the peace of these kingdoms if the marriage takes place.’

  Elizabeth now began to write to George, adding to the pressure. She mentioned the ‘many testimonies of your affection’ she and her husband had received, and implored him to use his ‘best means’ to persuade her father ‘to show himself now, in his helping of the prince here, a true loving father to us both’. In June 1620, an open letter addressed to George began to circulate the streets of London, pointing out the failure of previous unions between England and Spain, and urging the favourite to use his ‘many talents’ for ‘God’s glory and your honour’ by ‘dissuading privately by humble entreaties, and opposing publicly by your solid reasons, this Spanish Match’.

  Then, in November, news reached London that Frederick and Elizabeth had been deposed. Imperial troops had routed Frederick’s poorly organized and supplied forces just outside Prague, a clash that became known as the Battle of the White Mountain. In an apparently coordinated move, his Catholic rival, the Duke of Bavaria, had occupied parts of the Palatinate, his ancestral lands in Germany. As a result, Frederick and Elizabeth had been forced to flee to the Hague, the capital of the Protestant Dutch Republic, with little more than the clothes on their backs and a bag containing the Bohemian Crown Jewels.

  The reaction in London was intense. ‘Tears, sighs and loud expressions of wrath are seen and heard in every direction,’ a diplomat reported. ‘They have even found letters scattered in the streets, against the King, threatening that if his Majesty does not do what is expected of him, the people will assuredly display unmistakably their feelings and their wrath.’ James, who was in Newmarket at the time, pronounced himself ‘very sad and grieved’, and ‘remained constantly shut up in his room’, forbidding his courtiers from indulging in ‘any kind of game or recreation’.

  In the turmoil of the unfolding events abroad, and the growing sense of Protestant fury at home, all hopes for the Spanish match seemed to disintegrate. The forces used to support the Holy Roman Emperor’s attack on Prague and to seize Frederick’s ancestral lands had included troops raised in the Spanish Netherlands, the region of the Low Countries under Spanish rule, and were led by an Italian general in Spain’s service. This made a matrimonial alliance with Spain, the Holy Roman Empire’s main ally, seem like a betrayal of the Protestant religion as well as James’s daughter and grandchildren.

  Matters reached their lowest point in October 1621, when Sir John Digby, James’s veteran ambassador in Madrid, returned from a mission to Vienna to negotiate with the Holy Roman Emperor over the fate of the Palatinate.

  Digby, regarded by many at court as being too close to the Spanish, gave a furious report of his humiliation at the hands of the emperor and his ally, the Duke of Bavaria, who refused all efforts at achieving a peaceful settlement. Digby told the king in the presence of the entire Privy Council that James must go to war, to restore honour and the Palatinate to the Stuart line. The council called for immediate retaliation, proposing a diversionary attack on the Spanish Netherlands. But James played for time. He agreed to send £40,000 to his son-in-law to help him maintain a court in exile. He also decided to recall Parliament, which had been adjourned since the previous June, in the hope of raising more money.

  The king’s reaction plunged the court into a state of confusion and frustration. ‘The idea is now being put about with various and ill grounded reports, that it is not possible to do anything to help,’ the Venetian ambassador wrote. James had ‘several times remarked that he never wished to meddle in the affairs of Bohemia, and he clearly foresaw these disasters’. On this occasion, however, the impression of royal weakness was misleading. Digby’s declaration had prompted James into an uncharacteristic burst of decisive activism, but in a direction quite opposite to that clamoured for by his councillors and Parliament. Beati pacifici – blessed are the peacemakers – was his motto, and he was not about to abandon it.

  A reconciliation with George and Charles seems to have given added vigour to the king’s plans. Having felt increasingly isolated from them, he managed to draw them into a secret strategy which he was sure would satisfy all parties and re-establish some kind of order. The deathbed declaration of support for the Spanish match by Charles’s mother had left the prince open to the idea of maintaining relations with Spain, but only if it could be reconciled with saving his sister Elizabeth. This was what James now argued could be achieved.

  As Digby’s declaration had made clear, though the attack on Bohemia and the Palatinate had involved Spanish troops, it had been done in the name of the Holy Roman Emperor, not the King of Spain. If Charles were to marry into the Spanish royal family, then that would surely make it possible for the prince to prevail on his father-in-law, Philip, to put pressure on his kinsman the emperor to reach a peaceful settlement on the restoration of the Palatinate.

  Parliament was recalled in late November 1621. On 24 November, Digby was allowed to repeat before a joint session of both Houses his angry denunciation of the Holy Roman Emperor. He did not hold back. In the interests of preserving peace, James had reached a point from which could ‘descend no lower’, Digby said, so the king ‘must resolve either to abandon his Children or prepare for a war’. He urged MPs to raise £900,000 immediately to finance a relief force that would retake the Palatinate.

  This was music to the members’ ears, having adjourned the previous session pledging to offer the king financial assistance ‘to the utmost’ if the Palatinate were not restored.

  Meanwhile, James had a private meeting with Gondomar to explain that Digby was being allowed to make these allegations to shift the focus of parliamentary anger away from Spain to the Duke of Bavaria, the emperor’s ally, who had led the attack on the Palatinate. He also revealed that he had a plan to dissolve Parliament in the event of it threatening to declare war with Spain. He and George were going to disappear to Newmarket, leaving Charles ‘with a secret commission’ to prevent Parliament from meddling ‘in any matter other than in conceding him a supply of money for the succour of the Palatinate’. If it was to veer from that course, then James would call for its immediate dissolution.

  A few days later, secret letters between the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of Spain, intercepted by Dutch spies, were handed to the king. These showed that the young Philip IV, who had inherited the Spanish throne following the death of his father Philip III in March of that year, was increasingly nervous about the emperor’s uncompromising stance, suggesting a gap was opening up between Spain and the Holy Roman Empire.

  James acted promptly. George sent a message to his parliamentary proxy, Sir George Goring, telling him to deliver a speech to the Commons. He instructed his old friend to introduce a motion that the House should draw up a ‘
protestation’ to the king, declaring that, if Philip IV did not ‘give over’ his military support of the Holy Roman Emperor’s occupation of the Palatinate ‘either direct or indirectly, then we may have a thorough war with him’.

  Goring had been one of the ‘Master Fools’ recruited by the Baynard’s Castle plotters to introduce George Villiers to court in 1615. He was popular at Westminster. According to the Venetian ambassador, ‘people of all constitutions’ were drawn ‘wonderfully to him’. However, he was no heavyweight, ‘a man more given to joking than to affairs’, according to one hostile colleague. He was also known to be one of George’s placemen. This made his bellicose intervention all the more startling. The Commons was prohibited from dealing in foreign policy matters. When it had strayed into such areas in the past, trouble would usually result and dissolution very likely follow. But here was this joker, best known for being a lackey of the favourite, inviting, perhaps luring them to do just that.

  Confused by and suspicious of what they had witnessed, the MPs duly referred the matter to a committee.

  After lodging the motion, the equally mystified Goring wrote back to George, reporting that, though his speech had been taken ‘wonderfully well’, ‘the House was much distracted therewith’. Nervous that ‘I have undone myself at Court’ by publicly expressing such views, he reassured George that he had spoken ‘the very words’ he had been instructed to use, delivered with ‘as much circumspection in every kind for his Majesty’s service as my poor judgment could afford’. Tellingly, he added in the margin that ‘His Majesty’s end is not known to any flesh’ (crossing out the word ‘flesh’) – an indication that the plot, though instigated by George, had originated with James.

  Whatever qualms parliamentarians may have had about the dangers, Goring’s intervention unleashed an explosion of anti-Spanish and anti-papist sentiment. James had presumably hoped to provoke a simple motion for war against the Holy Roman Emperor to recover the Palatinate that would be voted through unamended, since it accurately reflected the views of MPs during the previous Parliament. There were even hopes a much-needed subsidy bill might result. But the MPs could not stop themselves from loading Goring’s proposal with clauses against Catholics and the Spanish match until it threatened to become a wholesale protestation at the general state of affairs. Charles became particularly incensed at a demand that he should only marry someone ‘of our own religion’, writing to George that he would ‘wish that the king would send down a commission’ so that ‘such seditious fellows’ who had dared question the prince’s matrimonial plans ‘might be made an example to others’. In the end, James obliged, dismissing Parliament and personally tearing out from the official Commons Journal the page carrying the final version of the protestation.